Pandora's Failure
by Rurouni Star
Summary: [MK][oneshot] They said there was one thing left in the box when she closed it. Maybe it's gone.


This is a slight rewrite from the original, which was a bit convoluted with the paragraph spacing. I think I changed a word or two, but that's about it.

The reason this is rated PG-13 is because it's very serious and very unhappy. This will not be continued. If I change my mind later, so be it – but this is the original and any additions will just be for my peace of mind.

**Pandora's Failure  
By Rurouni Star**

_"Is there life before death?"  
_**-Graffito (from Belfast)**

They say your life passes before your eyes when you die.

I'd never believed 'them' before. After all, everyone who might know is dead.

But when I slept alone at night, I dreamt of it. I saw the faintly smiling demon that had led us all to ruin, the man whose death above all else I desired. The smell of my own blood was thick – and the thought struck me that I had never before been able to smell and hear and see and feel so vividly before, even out of the dream world. I was me and I was him and I was everything else that had to die for us to die. I saw in my own eyes the tired look of someone that truly had looked over their own life; someone that knew this moment would be the most important of that life, even as they died. And as the throbbing of the Kazaana grew more painful and biting, I knew what the end of this dream would be, even before it never came.

Because I always woke up.

That was four years ago, when I was sixteen. After I began traveling, I realized that to destroy the nightmare, I couldn't be alone. So I wasn't. Every night I could, I found a companion for myself to blindly drive away the fears and the pain and the unchanging not-end. It never worked, of course, but it also never stopped me from trying.

The women I used – I don't deny I did it – they never suspected a thing. Nor do I think they would have much cared.

Perhaps you think I'm being unfair. I prefer to call it brutally honest. You might laugh if I told you that, in many cases, they were using _me_.

Three years went by. It's such a simple thing to say: three years. Something that feels like what we might call a lifetime, though none of us, by virtue of the fact that we are alive, know what that really does feel like. Three years of nightmares and a haze of waking dreams and cruel, soft, enticing, sympathetic, needy, unhappy nights with those faces I can't forget – and the names I can never remember.

All of this, compressed into two words; in this way, 'three years' can be compared favorably to 'one day' or 'one hour' or even 'an instant'… or it can be called 'an eternity'.

To tell you I spent three years in hell is to belittle the very thing it was, just by naming it. Instead, I must relate to you the story she told me one night, beneath the stars: where all the evils in the world were trapped inside a little box, and the world was happy without them.

Pain, sadness, malice, cruelty, depravity, insanity: these were the unspeakables within which no man or woman had ever had to fear before. And one woman, through naïve curiosity, damned her whole race and me to eternal suffering because she let out the evils to fly where they would. She managed to trap the last one, though, the one they say was the worst thing of all, which would forever seal man's fate: pre-sentience. The ability to see ahead of you and to know your own death. This, she told me, was the only thing trapped in that little box, and it saved the race of man from despair.

I must now tell you that Kagome was crying during that time. She knew that I alone, before all other men, knew my death. None of those women, back to the first of them, the damnable woman that opened that hellish box, none of them had saved me. Despair had struggled free of its bonds, all for me, all to tell me the one thing I had hoped to my god I could prevent – or at least to pretend to prevent, barring any other barren comfort! – my whole life.

Three years. Can you tell me now that there is anything worse than living for three years?

But you've heard only those three years; those three indescribably horrifying, haunting years.

There is a fourth.

For when I was nineteen, I met my innocent woman, the one to clamp the lid back on the box of terrors and save me from my own hopelessness and insanity. Such a silly way to meet her, too. The first time I looked at her, I glanced and saw only what I was sure I would see: a silly woman, a spiteful woman, perhaps she was even an adulterous woman for all I knew. They were all the same to me.

But before I could look away, satisfied that I was once again right, that I could safely drown in my pain again for forever, my eye caught on something.

A glint!

A _shard._

I couldn't stop myself. My eyes were drawn to its depths, its clear, shockingly pure (_pure!_) center. I was looking, too, right into her soul. _She_ was the pure one. The jewel was just a mockery, a symbol of her and a blurred, broken reflection of something infinitely more pure inside of her.

In that moment, my heart nearly stopped. I had been wrong – what if I'd been wrong before? – what if some of them had cried, had hurt for me, had I left them behind and destroyed them with my incomparably darker, more sinful heart?

But the moment passed, and I remembered them, all the ones that I had been with. They had worn the jewels but not the manner; there was no way I could have mistaken them had they been like this.

For once, my life did move in a blur. The agonizing slowness with which life passed had sped up, and she was now leaning against me as I sped away with her and her jeweled heart. The girl frowned at me as though I were some annoyance, some person that meant to play a game with her when she was trying to be serious.

More than ever, then, I realized she wasn't for me. She didn't understand the dangers of an unknown man – that I could be so much worse than just a jewel shard hunter and that I could hurt her beyond recovery. I couldn't ruin that – or her. Never could I hurt her. It would be tantamount to tearing gouges in my own soul.

So when she moved to leave… I let her.

And even as I rode away, that soul was screaming at me:

You fool, you _fool!_, you let your salvation get away!

I think I made it to a town. I remember setting myself up in a room with geisha, women all eager to please a customer and despite the fact that their more pleasurable aspects were normally meant for wealthier men, women were _always_ eager to please _me_. It never helped, as you might think it should. It didn't help then.

But when she came through the door, the sudden weight that had dragged me back to my personal hell was gone, and I was suddenly grasping her hand with my trademark smile, proclaiming her a Buddha to a man in hell.

I don't think she quite understood what it meant. But she _did_ understand a little. Perhaps proof that she wasn't quite as innocent as I liked to believe. Certainly, her protector took offense to the comment.

The lightness that came over me was strange. I hadn't felt it in years. So the boy wanted to fight – let him fight! I could fight him. I could fight an army. I was reckless and daring again, and I was supposed to be a stupid teen so goddamnit, why hadn't I been acting like one before now?

I laughed as we traded blows; I felt his anger and it made me happier. I could be – I was. I would be. She had made me.

And even as he threw away my staff, this fool of a boy, this thing that was younger than me by four years (four, four was one more than three, and three was forever) I decided to show him that I wasn't scared anymore, could _never_ be scared again, and I opened my hand to the sky.

Do you know how that ended? Because it did have an ending. Unlike my dream, where I knew the ending but didn't see it, I saw the ending but didn't quite comprehend it. She had jumped in the way – a strange calm came over me as I sealed my hand again, knowing that even if I died, I couldn't harm her. I caught her against me, and we both went flying backward, but I held her tightly and cushioned her. It did hurt – physically. In other ways, though, I rejoiced. For just this moment, she could be mine, and it wouldn't even stain her.

The moment ended, as it always does. I felt myself getting attached. I couldn't handle an attachment, especially if I wanted to let her be. So I got rid of her (quite easily, too easily, so disappointing) and I explained.

Not everything. Never everything.

But enough that she looked at me with pity in her eyes.

_Please don't._ I wanted to tell her._ Don't think on it, don't try to understand it, it would hurt…_

But instead, I took her hands in mine, in the usual way I started with them, and asked her the question that usually precipitated much more. It made me feel guilty, of course, but it was fine. She refused, as I knew she would, and now she didn't pity me. No, I humored her. I was almost her friend. That was so much better.

And when later, what seemed centuries later but was only a year in that four years, she sat next to me under a starry sky and asked me why I hurt, I had to smile painfully and say it was nothing. Because it was. Compared to what it had been, this was nothing. I didn't _dream._ My sleep was blessed nothing, because the future was again uncertain, because she entered it. She _was_ the future, and it was my own future. Just by being here, I knew she changed everything.

And maybe, I thought, staring up at the sky, maybe I could love her after all, and not hurt her. Because things could change.

"You… you know a lot of legends, don't you, Miroku-sama?"

I looked up at her with a slight smile. "Yes, Kagome-sama. Did you want to hear one?" I could tell her things. I could light her up from the inside and make her glow and know that it was _me_ that did it, loving her in my way.

"No," she said hesitantly, and I felt disappointment drop me. "I… actually… I wanted to tell _you_ one…" The tiny frown on my face disappeared instantly. "I just… I don't know whether you'll have heard a version in this time…" she said, curling her hair about her finger nervously.

I smiled. "I'll listen whether I've heard it or not, certainly. It will be a delight just to have such a beautiful woman do that for me."

She blushed, and it made me leap just a little inside. Because I could say those things and _mean_ them and she could half believe me, just for a second.

And I did mean it. None of the others had offered to tell me a story, had they? Good lord, the thought might have sent them running. Just the fact that I could laugh at it went a long way to show how much I had come back. It made me so very thankful to her that I knew I could never refuse her anything, and I told her that even had she the inclination to tell me the same story tomorrow night and the next night and the night after that and forever onward, I would still listen with the same rapt attention because it would be her.

Inuyasha, down from his tree only for an instant to put on some more firewood, called me a shameless bastard. I remember this mostly because Kagome shot him a flat look that clearly said 'he can be shameless all he wants because it makes me feel good – why don't _you_ be a little _more_ shameless?' It sent a tiny thrill up my spine, even though I knew she did it because she wanted _him_ to be that for her.

Perhaps it was a guilty indulgence – oh, if only all my indulgences had been so small, I said lightly to myself, I wouldn't have so many women trying to hurt me. Well… one in particular. But that was a special case, as always.

After Inuyasha had leapt back into his tree and out of earshot, scowling but drowsy, Kagome leaned back into the moon-touched grass and stared up at the sky. I looked down at her, taking in every feature while she was unselfconscious, and waited for her to begin.

Her face took on a faraway look, looking up toward the stars, and I noticed a touch of sadness in it.

"My… my father-" her voice stopped abruptly, shaky from some supreme effort of will. I realized forebodingly that I had never heard her speak of her father before now. But she swallowed then, and managed all the same.

"My father," she said again, "used to tell me bedtime stories. But he never ran out, he never had to say one again – because he was an Anthropologist." She raised a hand to the moon, her fingers drifting through it as though it were right before her.

"He studied history, I guess. But it was more than that. It was… was…" she struggled for the right words. "…it was what people believed, too, what they wanted to believe and why and how sometimes their beliefs had lessons in them. Do you understand?" She glanced over at me hesitantly for confirmation.

I nodded slowly, not wanting to break the moment. "He studied religions," I clarified for myself. "And the legends that went with them, I assume."

She nodded a little, but her mouth remained turned downward, just a little.

"Yes, that's it," she said. "I know there was more to it, but that was the part he let me in on. You know, it was like… a secret, just between us."

I felt something soften in me at that. She was letting me in on something sacred. It had to be hard for her.

"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to," I said quietly. "If you want to keep those memories… it's fine." Because some memories were much, much too precious to give away. And we are all selfish that way.

"Oh no," she hastened to assure me, and I began to feel I was the only selfish one there. "It's not that. It's just that I wanted you to understand the context… I mean, that it's from somewhere else, but it's also from him and me…"

I understood. I understood more than she thought. Because I knew she still sometimes cried at night, and I knew she still loved him so badly it tore at her, and that she sometimes whispered little comforting things to herself, huddled in her bag, because he _would_ come back, he would, and she would go home and find him waiting for her in the house, in the temple, even though I'd watched him die and I'd seen the awful grave it left, I saw it every day…

I understood it too well.

"I'm sorry!" she said with a hitched breath, and I realized I had closed my eyes in grief and memory. "I'm sorry, I'll stop-"

"-no," I told her emphatically, surprising myself a little with the vehemence. "I have to remember too. There's no point in having someone that cared about you if you never…"

We had both fallen silent at this point. But Kagome knew it couldn't stay that way. She was brave where I was too weak to speak again.

"So… so he told me this one," she said shakily, her voice partly puzzled at my behavior and partly still unhappy from the shared misery. "He said it was from Greece, about a thousand and five hundred years ago."

_Three years is an eternity,_ I thought, _but a thousand and five hundred…_

"Oh," she said in surprise, "I guess it would really be just a thousand from here…" 'from here'. What an amazing view to take of traveling through time. Where I could be just a figment of her imagination, just a dead priest that lived once and lives again only by her graces…

_Oh,_ I thought tiredly, _but isn't that true in more ways than one?_

I silenced my thoughts to listen to her. She was trying to find the beginning.

Kagome looked up at the moon again, tracing her fingers around it quietly. "It started with… a box."

I could hear another voice behind hers, enfolded in memory and shrouded in uncertainty. I could tell what she was thinking: _Is this the way he said it, is it really the way it started, oh, it was so long ago, I'm afraid I've lost it…_

"The box," she picked up again, finding her memory, "was just a box. There was nothing special about it. It looked so normal and so boring that no one on earth ever bothered with it."

I smiled despite myself. I had a feeling that her father had taken a few liberties with this story, for there were very few I had heard that started so precisely. And who knew? She herself may have been improvising her own touches as she went, forgetting, half remembering, and adding bits of herself into it. All I knew was that I wanted to absorb it completely, because it was _her_.

"One day, though," she continued, still staring upward at the milky sky, "the gods made someone new – the first woman, who was named Pandora. They gave her beauty and skill and adorned her with jewelry and silks and sent her down to the earth with gifts from each of them. But before she could go, a goddess took her aside – she hadn't given her a gift yet, and some gods said it was because she was jealous of the attention Pandora had gotten from them all." Kagome was making little dips into the moon with her fingers, as though she could mark it with them.

"Her gift was a warning," she murmured, forehead creased with some difficult emotion. "She told Pandora never to open the box because it held a terrible secret. Pandora promised her she wouldn't open the box, of course, and then she went to earth as she was supposed to."

I knew the ending would be grim with this. Because the things you were warned against, you craved. I'd learned that – I was still learning it. Mushin had warned me as I was young that drink and women and all the rest of the sins brought their own weight with them. He told me to do myself a favor and forget them.

Surely, you understand what happened.

"She saw the box," Kagome continued. "She saw it every day, and at first she was able to ignore it." Her voice trembled. "But the days wore on… and she began to wonder…"

_(What is it like, having someone hold you that way? Could it save me from myself, from my future…)_

"Certainly, it couldn't hurt just to peek, she thought privately…"

_(I'll just have to try it and see. I'm sure if I can find the right one_... _and it really couldn't hurt, could it?)_

"Finally, when she could take it no longer, she snuck out one night under the dark moon, and went to the simple box."

_(I remember doing that. I remember.) _

"I'll just take a peek, she thought, no one will know and I'll never come back again. Certainly that will be all right."

Kagome paused and turned away from me with a swallow, and I recognized that the terrible end was coming. "So she opened it," she said. "Just a little bit, like she'd thought. But the things inside were too strong, too awful, and they flew out everywhere, screeching and biting at her, and the whole earth woke up in the middle of the night to watch."

She had put her back to me. I really had stirred up some painful memory, hadn't I? I moved to comfort her, but she kept talking.

"She'd let out cruelty and anger and disease and pain…" Kagome said in a hoarse voice. "All the evils of the world that no one had known before. But there was something left in the box more awful than anything else yet, only it hadn't gotten out yet because it was at the bottom. So she slammed the lid back on and caught it in there. And she realized that she'd made an awful mistake, that it hadn't been worth sating her curiosity…" Her voice rose at the end to a strange, almost strangled pitch.

_No, _I thought. _I remember that too. It didn't help at all._

"What was left in the bottom of the box?" I asked, knowing even as I did that I myself had made Pandora's fatal error. I didn't have to know. What good would it do me to know? I should have just shushed her and told her goodnight and let her cry it to sleep…

Kagome's hand went to her eyes then, and I caught my breath. She was _already_ crying.

"Despair," she told me, eyes glimmering, a few tears already spilling over and down and across her cheeks. "Because everyone would have… would have known how they were going to die… and not been able to stop it…"

She hugged herself, suddenly looking lost and frightened. "I should have remembered that part. I should have changed it. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry…"

I didn't really know what I was doing until it was done. She was in my arms and I was running my fingers through her hair as though she were a child. "No," I told her. "It's okay, Kagome-sama." She sobbed again, and I wasn't sure whether it was because she was afraid she had brought something painful up or because it was painful for her as well.

"It's really okay, Kagome-sama," I repeated softly. "I'm… I'm fine with it." I'm not.

"But you're not supposed to be," she told me frustratedly, crying into my chest. "You're supposed to be… to be happy, and you're supposed to live a long, long time with all those kids…"

Despite the situation, my mouth quirked into a grin. "If you're offering, Kagome…" I told her suggestively.

She hit me in the chest, but only very weakly, as though she were afraid to drive me away.

"And sometimes," she told me in a whisper, as though she hadn't heard me at all, "I wonder if it really matters what was left in the stupid box, because there's so much here already… and it _hurts_ so much sometimes…"

When I caught her lips against mine, it was pure instinct. A need to comfort, a need to fill a gaping hole that couldn't remain forever. I filled her with the infinite care I had for her and I tried to fix the hole I'd found in her heart as she'd done for me. I think she knew. I hope she did. I hope she _understood_ it, despite the fact that it will hurt her so much more now if she does.

Because it's here, and I'm looking back over that moment, along with all the other ones that make up my life as I stand him down and recognize this place and time. The darkness in my heart, my opposite, regards me with a bitter anger that lets me know that _he_ knows.

This place will be our grave.

"Naraku."

The beads slide off, even as the bees appear around him. The saimyoshou that mean the end for me as well.

"You still intend on doing this," he says quietly - as though there's any choice! I can't help but laugh at him.

"Try to change it," I tell him. "Why don't you take send your bees away? You could change my fate so easily. I can't do a thing about yours, you know. While you breathe, I'm dying anyway. And if I let you live, you destroy the only thing that matters to me."

Naraku gives a cold chuckle. "If I'm going to hell, so are you, Houshi."

My own desperate smile tightens. "So be it. Be ready. We both know the dream ends here."

And I tear the beads – I break them to little bits, knowing I will never use them again and not wanting them to catch on some tree for them to see later, some broken, gruesome bit of me to cry at…

I never wanted to make her cry.

And I have to wonder, as the world fades away – the stings in my palm make my eyes grow heavy at the same time the chasm widens, ruptures, enflames…

_"There's no point in having someone that cared about you if you never…"_

If you never remember them. If you never acknowledge that they existed and they mattered and they _still_ matter…

That had been what I was going to say. But I never did. Because I _don't_ want her to remember. I want her to forget and be happy and never have to cry about _me_ in the dark of night because she wants to make my existence worthwhile.

I lived to make her happy. Not my whole life, not as you would see it, no. But this one year… it has been the only year I really did live.

A life of a year.

_Three years… take away two…_

A third of an eternity. With her.

I close my eyes against the pain and grit my teeth, remembering her hair her smile, her warmth, her blushes, even her tears… all for me, just then…

"Don't remember me," I beg, because I know there's someone listening, there _has_ to be someone listening that will tell her. "You don't have to, just be happy, please…"

And as darkness sets in, I look into a once sealed box, the one I've held inside me, never daring to confirm what I already know. I search the bottom, I look into the deepest, darkest part of it, the part of my heart that took away so many people's happiness – the part that will take hers now. I scour it desperately, but I know the truth.

It's empty.

_Oh, Pandora,_ I whisper, but it's not a whisper, it's barely that. _You failed._


End file.
